The Monday After: Saving Grace {Hyacynth}

We leave church inspired and filled with Truth and encouragement on Sundays … and somewhere along the course of the week, pieces of the message tend to fade and we often lose that Sunday feeling.

The Monday After {the Sunday Sermon} is our attempt to carry the Sunday message into Monday mornings by walking together and sharing how what we’ve heard on Sunday morning is making a difference in our Mondays, our weeks, our lives. Each Monday, a voice from the pews will give personal perspective to the words we soaked in on Sunday.

The Monday After Sunday, April 7, 2013: Saving Grace

By Hyacynth Worth

Lately toilet paper has threatened hostile take over of the Worth house.

About three times each week for the past few weeks I’ve found myself cleaning up messes related to it.

Either I’m fishing gobs and gobs out of toilet paper out of the downstairs toilet because apparently our 3.5 year old son has a different idea of what “only a little bit” of toilet paper looks like, or I’m rerolling an entire package of unrolled toilet paper that’s ankle high in the bathroom.

The first few times I gently said to my blue-eyed cutie, “Son, we only need a little bit of toilet paper” and “Son, we don’t unroll all of the rolls of toilet paper.”

But the last few times?

It was went more like this: “EJ! If you unroll ONE more roll of toilet paper mommy is going to FREAK OUT!”

Only after I yelled this down the hallway did I realize that I already did what I said I was going to do if he did it again; I was freaking out over unrolled toilet paper rolls.

Sigh. I am an imperfect parent to imperfect people.

And I’m so glad.

I’m so glad I’m an imperfect parent to imperfect people because it magnifies how perfect of a parent, how good of a parent God has been to me, to us.

Because let’s be honest here; EJ isn’t the only one who has been unrolling the toilet paper and clogging the toilet, leaving self-created messes piled high on the floor, water overflowing and soaking the carpets.

I make plenty of my own messes, too, that make me unworthy of God’s mercy; He often doesn’t give me what I deserve when I make a big old mess. He extends to us forgiveness time and again without being the parent who freaks out.

God is a way better parent than I am, than any of us.

But what makes Him good has nothing to do with our messes. Yes, He extends me mercy by not giving us what we deserve when we create messes, but also He extends to us boundless grace by giving us what we don’t deserve.

And what we don’t deserve is His gift of Jesus giving up His perfect life on a jagged tree, taking on our sins so that we could be wiped clean and enter into relationship with the Father forever.

He is the perfect Parent who doesn’t grade on a curve; He instead straightens the curve into a line that stretches from one of Jesus’ nailed hands to the other. We only have to receive the wide-open gift of Jesus dying in our place.

Pastor Joe said we understand grace only when we recognize that it’s not about us and what we can do, but when we acknowledge it’s about Him and what He has done.

As an imperfect parent, I realize how great this gift is — because it’s one I can never fully gift to my own children being imperfect as I am.

Hyacynth Worth is an imperfect child of the Perfect Father, wife to John and mother to two little boys. In between cleaning up toilet paper messes, she writes about grace, motherhood and living a healthy lifestyle at Undercover Mother and coordinates social media for Immanuel.